When Todd Walthall first sat down with a team of UX consultants, his first thought was, “What are these guys going to tell me?” As a veteran contact center executive, Todd was adept at driving business results in challenging operational environments, relying heavily on metrics to guide his decision making. But now he had a bigger challenge: Develop a vision for transforming the digital channels at USAA, a Fortune 150 financial services company with a history of exceptional customer service on the phones. He reached out for help – and in the process, learned how to harness the power of UX for developing and articulating an actionable, long-term strategy. Todd will share his personal experiences with UX design along with some practical tips for UX professionals who are trying to transform traditional businesses from the inside-out.

In the past few years, we have witnessed an explosion of new online business models and technologies that enable people to create their very own product lines without the need to set up a traditional brick and mortar shop. This user-generated industrial revolution—or People Powered Products — means people can truly unleash their creativity and produce retail-quality products without any of the financial risks associated with old-school manufacturing, inventory management, and distribution chains.

This revolution can be viewed as the culmination of three longer-term trends. First, innovation in small-scale manufacturing or on-demand manufacturing brought product personalization to the market. Next came the rise of user-to-user marketplaces like eBay or Amazon that introduced new, highly efficient ways to connect buyers to sellers in the long tail. And third, online communities and social networks are now tapping into the viral loop to enable producers to market to millions of niches outside of traditional distribution chains.

The intersection of these three trends has created something new: people making—and selling—their own products. Companies such as Ponoko, Styleshake, Kickstarter, Quirky, and Blurb are pushing the user-generated business models in new, profitable directions by focusing on smaller niches; offering platforms for production of commercial-quality goods; and building robust, connected communities.

So, what might this mean to designers and product planners? This presentation will share examples, outline implications and provide a framework for designing businesses in the age of people powered products. It’s quite possible that people powered business models will make user-generated content profitable long before YouTube does.

In genetics they talk of the “phenotype”. This is any observable characteristic or trait of an organism including its form and structure, development, behaviour, and even products of behaviour such as a bird’s nest.

An unusual property of humans (compared with other organisms) is language, since for the first time information about long-term survival can be passed by other means than genes. This has led to the creation of the subject of ‘memes’, as analogous to genes, as carriers of information in human society.

Memes have allowed humans to create buildings, cities, and to fly like gods through the sky, albeit often in rather cramped surroundings with terrible food.

And to create computers.

So should we regard computers as part of the phenotype of humans? And if so, should we care?

Global Pulse is an innovation initiative that is developing a new approach to crisis impact monitoring. Global Pulse is developing HunchWorks, a place where experts of all kinds can post hypotheses—or hunches—that may warrant further exploration and then crowdsource data and verification. HunchWorks will be a key global platform for rapidly detecting emerging crises and their impacts on vulnerable communities. Using it, experts will be able to quickly surface ground truth and detect anomalies in data about collective behavior for further analysis, investigation and action.

Adaptive Path has been collaborating with the Global Pulse team to identify the challenges surrounding HunchWorks to help with some of the complex UX problems and design solutions. With a idea as big HunchWorks, we wanted to open up the task to the UX community in order to push the work forward.

Session Takeaways:

Learn UX principles through hands-on engagement

Be a part of designing for the UN’s initiative to detect and mitigate crises.

Work with members of the UN Global Pulse team to solve specific UX/design problems.

Employ different methods for collaborative generation and synthesizing of concepts.

The introduction of Internet or Web enabled televisions (WETV) has spurred varying degrees of interests among hardware manufacturers and consumers. Its promise was that it would change the way we consume entertainment in the living room. Why wouldn’t you want to have your TV double as an all-in-one set-top box or computer? Why pay $75 per month for cable when Hulu streams TV for free? Why sit with a laptop when news, social media updates, photographs, games, and video chat are all available on a big bright LED TV screen, alongside all your personal and desired video content?

Internet TV presents exciting and intriguing opportunities but thus far has failed to catch on with a large amount of consumers. Google TV, Boxee, and other set-top box products will acknowledge that one source for this slow adoption is that ABC, CBS and NBC have blocked their online TV shows from view through these devices. Compounding the problem, and perhaps of more concern to our audience, is the obsolete forms of navigation and input as seen through the tradition TV remote control.

With diligence, many of these problems may be overcome. Google and Apple are sure to ink deals with content providers and the hardware manufacturers are sure to improve input devices. However, we believe the real promise lies with a robust delivery of application software (apps) specifically designed to enhance one’s TV viewing experience in the context of the living room.

At The Ohio State University, we have investigated ways to enhance the user experience of WETV. I propose to deliver a presentation that will outline our process of discovery, conceptualization, evaluation, and development. The presentation will be supported by several dynamic proposals. My goal in participating in UX Week is to share our ideas and theories on this emerging topic. More importantly, I expect to stimulate a dialogue amongst colleagues to further investigations in this area. This presentation should be of particular interest to designers and developers who aspire to engage in this form of user experience.

We are in an age where the power to connect in new ways feels limitless. This presents an exciting and important opportunity to shape the future to serve, empower, and delight people and society.

CCA’s Interaction Design program mission is to create a leading undergraduate educational experience to train future interaction designers with a bold and unique mix of skills that form the core of what is most useful and in demand in the field. The curriculum focuses on systemic and behavioral design with additional emphasis on the necessary visual and technology craft skills to communicate and demonstrate work.

These designers will learn to create meaningful and innovative experiences in the realms of work, lifestyle, and play—from computers and mobile devices to interactive physical spaces, games, and social networks. Students develop process skills (systemic thinking, design research, prototyping) and technical skills (wireframes, flows, visuals, motion, prototypes) for interactive experiences such as mobile, desktop, dashboard, game console, film, sculpture, clothes, buildings, and applications that can be applied to numerous contexts, from business to entertainment to education to health. Our program takes a studio-based, collaborative, playful approach to preparing students for both acquiring choice entry-level jobs upon graduation and to become future leaders in this creative and vibrant field.

In this talk I will discuss the program and how we developed it. Specifically we put a design process in place to learn from students what they are excited about and from industry, what they need most. Along the way I encountered a special handful of practitioners who both combined a phenomenal number of skills and were wildly successful. This process involved 100+ people and helped inform curriculum for what will make a successful interaction designer in the future.

We’ve come to UX Week to obsess over interactive user experience. But as a filmmaker, I’ll note that the medium of the moving picture has been around far longer than the models of human-computer interaction. When I’m tasked with making video for conveying the value and experience of an interactive tech product, I find it benefits me to invoke the language of the moving image in unexpected ways. So I’d like to obsess about that in three parts:

1) How does one translate the essence of a non-linear interactive experience to a linear piece of video, usually constrained by the time and attention of the viewer?

2) Let’s reverse direction: What elements from the language of film can we draw on in creating the interactive user experiences that make up our software and hardware?

3) And let’s get meta: How do the tools of the videomaker reflect our understanding of our relationship to linear media? Do the metaphors hold?

Let’s explore the relationship between what you do as a UX designer and what I do as a videomaker.